TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1. MOUNTAIN HOME
vi 3
2. THE SUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN TO ESTABLISH A PARK
15
3. THE CAMPAIGN TO ACQUIRE A LAND BASE
27
4. BUILDING THE PARK: THE CCC ERA
43
5. BUILDING THE PARK: FROM WORLD WAR II TO MISSION 66
59
6. AN IMPASSE OVER WILDERNESS
73
7. PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL DECADE
89
8. MANAGING GROWTH: 1982 TO THE PRESENT
99
9. VISITOR PROTECTION
109
10. VISITOR ACCOMMODATIONS
121
11. FOREST PROTECTION
135
12. WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT
145
13. FISHERIES MANAGEMENT
159
14. BIOLOGICAL MONITORING
169
15. PRESERVING THE MOUNTAIN CULTURE
181
16. THE INTERPRETIVE PROGRAM
191
17. CADES COVE
203
18. THE LEGACY OF DISPOSSESSION
211
19. THE CHEROKEE
223
20. PARTNERS OLD AND NEW
233
21. CONCLUSION
241
APPENDIX 1: LEGISLATIVE ACTS
244
APPENDIX 2: SUPERINTENDENTS
245
APPENDIX 3: ANNUAL VISITATION
246
INDEX
247
v
CHAPTER TWELVE
WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT
Incident report: a woman was feeding a bear from her car when the bear suddenly climbed into the car and took a seat beside her. The woman tried to coax the bear out of her car; she received injuries. Another incident report: a man was feeding a bear a few dozen feet from the edge of the road. After the bear ate everything the man had to offer, it followed him back to his car. The man tried to discourage the animal by touching his lighted cigarette to its nose….1 Incidents such as these were legion. Resource managers often quipped that to protect visitors from bears and vice versa would require one ranger for every bear in the park. As the black bear population was anywhere from 400 to 1,600 strong, this was obviously impossible. Indeed, at Great Smoky Mountains National Park the world’s most concentrated population of black bears shared habitat with the world’s most concentrated population of wilderness goers. Park staff began to wrestle with the “bear problem” in the 1930s, and “bear management” (which is really a shorthand term for bear and people management) became a staple of park administration from then onwards. But there were other significant challenges for wildlife management as well. Next in importance to the black bear was the wild boar, a prolific and destructive exotic species that had to be contained even if it could not be eliminated. Then there was the deer, which threatened to become too numerous in the forest openings that the park maintained around Cades Cove. And in recent decades much effort was given to reintroducing species that had once inhabited the area before it became a park, including river otter, red wolf, the peregrine falcon, and elk.
WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT I N T H E CCC E RA Before there was a bear problem there was a CCC problem. Soon after the CCC was deployed in 1933, wildlife biologists began urging host agencies, including the Park Service, to provide technical oversight of the many hundreds of youthful work crews to ensure that their efforts were beneficial, or at least not harmful, to wildlife habitat. The eminent wildlife
biologist Aldo Leopold described the pressing need for technical oversight in an article in Journal of Forestry in May 1934: There was, for example, the road crew cutting a grade along a clay bank so as permanently to roil the trout stream which another crew was improving with dams and shelters; the silvicultural crew felling the “wolf trees” and border shrubbery needed for game food; the roadside-cleanup crew burning all the down oak fuel wood available to the fireplaces being built by the recreation-ground crew; the planting crew setting pines all over the only open clover-patch available to the deer and partridges; the fire-line crew burning up all the hollow snags on a wild-life refuge, or worse yet, felling the gnarled veterans which were about the only scenic thing along a “scenic road.” In short, the ecological and aesthetic limitations of “scientific” technology were revealed in all their nakedness.2
The Park Service responded to these concerns by hiring “wildlife technicians” and putting them on the CCC payroll. The wildlife technicians had advanced degrees and sometimes college teaching experience, and they worked for $166 per month without benefits. Most stayed in the park through several consecutive CCC enrollment periods. Their first priority was to serve as watchdogs for CCC projects, recommending ways to enhance or mitigate the projects’ effects on wildlife habitat. Additionally they were to make wildlife investigations of various kinds. Of foremost importance, they were to determine whether additional land was necessary to provide all-year habitat for the park’s native wildlife, to assess the practicability of reintroducing native species that were gone from the park, and to learn which native species living in the park were abnormally low in numbers and what might be done to improve their status. The first two biologists at Great Smoky Mountains, Willis King and R. J. Fleetwood, arrived in the park in 1934. The following year H. M. Jennison arrived, probably replacing Fleetwood. The biologists were housed in a wildlife office and laboratory at Elkmont, several miles from Eakin’s tem-
H. M. Jennison was a professor of botany at the University of Tennessee and worked in the park every summer until 1938.
porary headquarters in Gatlinburg.3 They reported to the superintendent but they also reported to the Park Service’s Wildlife Division at the national level. Jennison, a professor of botany at the University of Tennessee, worked in the park each summer until 1938. King, a newly-minted Ph.D. whose expertise was fisheries, stayed with the park until 1940 when he took a job with the State of North Carolina. Much of what these men did was textbook wildlife management: taking projects that were primarily aimed at forestry and tweaking them so that they would benefit, or at least not harm, wildlife habitat. Wildlife managers referred to this intentional aligning of forestry and wildlife values as “coordination” or “indirect habitat improvement.” When a new truck trail was proposed, for example, a wildlife biologist went in advance of the work crew to mark individual trees that ought to be preserved because of their special value as wildlife habitat. Fleetwood made an investigation of how animals used dead chestnut trees. This study led to his recommendation that dead chestnuts still holding their limbs could be safely removed without harming wildlife, but old snags without limbs should be preserved because their decayed condition and softened heartwood made them important resources to cavity nesting birds and other animals that denned in trees.4 146
Some CCC projects involved direct habitat improvement. For example, CCC crews were assigned to trout stream restoration — cleaning up streambeds that were clogged by logging debris. In these instances a wildlife biologist instructed the CCC crew on what debris should be removed and what should be left in place to provide essential food and cover for aquatic life. In addition to his stream restoration work, King began a survey of all the streams in the park, and recommended which streams should receive priority for restocking.5 King described the general status of wildlife at Great Smoky Mountains in a 1937 report. Most of the native large mammals species had been wiped out prior to the area becoming a national park. This included bison and elk (both seasonal migrants in the western part of the Smokies and long ago hunted to extinction in the region), the eastern timber wolf and the eastern mountain lion (both thought to have been residents of the area until about the 1890s), and the eastern otter (thought to have been exterminated quite recently when King was writing). The white-tailed deer still hung on, but in such small numbers that King doubted if the population could be saved. On the bright side, King thought several species were coming back to natural population levels. These included eastern black bear, gray and red fox, bobcat, wild turkey, ruffed grouse, woodchuck, raccoon, opossum, and red squirrel.6 The park considered plans for restocking white-tailed deer. At one time officials expected to secure animals from nearby national forests and to release them at several locations on both the Tennessee and North Carolina sides of the park. President Roosevelt even suggested to Secretary Ickes that the European roe deer could be stocked in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Fortunately, by this time the Park Service was far too committed to the preservation of native fauna to consider the president’s proposal. Indeed, officials backed off the plan to transplant deer from nearby national forests based on their concerns that those deer would be of a different genetic stock than the so-called Virginia whitetailed deer found in the park. Furthermore, Eakin worried about the possibility that restocking deer could cause the deer population to rebound too quickly at a time when the amount of deer range in the park was artificially high. A sizable deer herd might flourish on the plentiful browse that grew in cutover and burned over areas, only to become too numerous and face starvation when these same areas reverted to forest. In any case, by the end of the decade deer began spreading into the park from the southeast without any help from restocking.7 There were some minor disagreements over predator control. Director Albright had banned predator control in
all national parks in 1931, ending the Park Service’s practice of killing mountain lions and wolves and other predators with a view toward increasing numbers of deer and elk for visitors to see and enjoy.8 Eakin, however, wanted to allow hunting of foxes, bobcats, and skunks, because they preyed on ground nesting birds such as quail, grouse, and wild turkeys. Without offering any evidence for it, he stated that foxes were abnormally numerous while ground nesting birds were scarce. He was overruled on this point and the fox hunting was stopped.9 However, on another point of predator control, killing of water snakes which were thought to be preying heavily on trout fry, Eakin was allowed to continue the control in the vicinity of trout rearing pools, popular swimming holes, and development areas. It was recommended that wildlife biologists at the park analyze the stomach contents of approximately 500 water snakes to determine if the snakes indeed preyed heavily on the trout. It seems that no such study was completed. Based on much later science, it is more likely that the snakes provide some benefit to the trout by removing diseased or stunted fish from the population.10 As CCC funding dwindled at the end of the 1930s, the Park Service lost its wildlife technicians. The Wildlife Division was abolished in 1940 and most of its staff transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As only a handful of biologists remained in the Park Service through the next two decades, most wildlife matters were left to the rangers. This changing of the guard coincided with the rise of bear management as the looming wildlife issue in the park.
BEAR MANAGEMENT The rangers’ approach to wildlife management might best be described as “hands-on.” They gathered information while on patrol and they addressed problems by direct action. When the park began to experience “The Bear Problem” in the late 1930s, the ranger force responded by going after the problem bears using billy clubs, small shot, and chemical sprays in an effort to frighten the bears away from people. Arthur Stupka, the park naturalist, thought this approach was futile, since other bears would just take the place of those that were driven away. Moreover, he resented how the rangers had taken this matter in hand without consulting him. He only learned about their weapons arsenal indirectly through sources in Gatlinburg. He advised Eakin that the only way to change the bears’ behavior was to remove what the bears were after, namely food in the form of garbage and handouts. The only way to do that was to install bear-proof garbage containers and change human behavior by teaching visitors not to feed bears.11
Willis King, a newly minted Ph.D. whose expertise was fisheries, was one of the first biologists to work in the new park. He stayed with the Smokies until 1940 when he took a job with the state of North Carolina.
The park tried both these measures. Eakin launched a publicity campaign to teach park visitors of the need to keep a safe distance from bears and resist feeding them. The park also replaced ordinary garbage cans in picnic areas with a heavier type of can as well as a sunken type in which the lid was level with the ground and was operated by a foot pedal. The first type was decidedly not “bear proof,” and the second type did not work because visitors overfilled them and did not close the lids properly. Meanwhile, rangers continued their hands-on approach by live-trapping bears in campgrounds and taking them to remote sections of the park for release. This worked for some bears but the worst offenders — the bears that invaded the campgrounds most frequently — would not go in the traps.12 Over the years, the rangers’ methods of handling problem bears became more resourceful and drastic. They tried electric fencing. They captured bears by live trapping or tranquilizing them. They transported problem bears to more and more remote locations, and they finally resorted to killing a few of the most incorrigible bears. Sometimes the rangers’ innovations lacked official sanction. Two rangers in the 1950s 147
Park Naturalist Arthur Stupka convinced Superintendent Eakin that the only way to change the bears’ behavior was to remove what the bears were after, namely food in the form of garbage and handouts.
employed a low-velocity, ten-gauge shotgun which they elaborately christened a “Bear Removal Device.” The shotgun barrel was muffled and concealed from public view by a metal can housing, and the weapon was rigged so that it could be fired out the window of a ranger patrol car. The shotgun blast was aimed at the bear’s rump and was supposed to hurt but not harm the animal. The car siren would be sounded at the same time, further scaring the bear as well as covering the sound of the shotgun. The rangers thought this technique gave good results, but when their superiors learned about it the weapon was quickly retired.13 The bear problem centered around campgrounds and picnic areas where human food and garbage was most readily available, but it gradually ramified into other areas of park operations. Bears appeared on the edges of the road, especially the most heavily traveled road over Newfound Gap, and when people stopped in their cars to view or feed these animals the result was often an enormous traffic tie-up, known in the park as a “bear jam.” Such traffic slowdowns became so frequent as to be practically standard fare for driving through the park. The chief ranger reported no less than 493 bear jams in one month (July 1963) — and this was just on the Tennessee side of the Newfound Gap Road.14 Bears also began to stray back and forth across the park boundary. Pushed to the edge of the park by population pressure, some bears ventured forth to raid hog pens and kill cattle and sheep located outside the park. Of course, wildlife biologists had long stressed the fact that political boundaries meant nothing to wildlife; sanctuaries could protect populations of roaming animals but not individual animals in the population. There were reports of mounting property damage. This situation led to criticism that the Park Service’s wildlife protection policy was creating a nuisance bear population, and the park faced the possibility of tort claims and 148
a resurgence of poaching. In 1952, park neighbor Tom Alexander, owner of the Cataloochee Ranch, organized a hunt of a cattle-killing bear and shot the animal in the park in open defiance of the law. When the Park Service pressed charges, Alexander received considerable sympathy from media and friends and was finally acquitted by a trial jury.15 Besides panhandling bears and marauding bears, there was also the sad situation of bears held captive to attract tourists in Gatlinburg and Cherokee. Several merchants in both towns kept bears in cages or chained to posts in front of their businesses, evidently convinced that these captive bears drew tourists and put more money in their cash registers. However, if some tourists were attracted to the captive animals, others thought they were a pathetic and shameful sight and complained to the Park Service. The Park Service responded to these complaints by saying that it had no grounds to take action because the businesses were located outside the park, unless it received information that the bears had been captured in the park. But it did encourage these tourists to make their objections known to the town merchants. Tourists’ complaints eventually ended this practice in both towns, although several cages with bears still graced the main streets of Cherokee as late as 1975. A state law against putting captive bears on display was passed that year, but it did not apply on the Indian reservation. It was finally up to the Tribal Council to eliminate the practice in Cherokee.16 Yet another extension of the bear problem was the spread of human-bear incidents into the backcountry. By the 1960s, bears scavenged for garbage around backcountry shelter sites and campsites and some were so bold as to raid camps where food was stored unattended. Rangers tried to counter this development by instructing backpackers to burn all combustible refuse and pack out the rest.17 The ranger force began keeping statistics on bear incidents in the park and by 1969 it had ten years of data. From 1960 to 1969, the total number of incidents fluctuated between 10 and 148 per year, with an average of 97 per year. The total number of bears captured ranged from 7 to 81 per year, with an average of 34 per year. Over this period the rangers recorded a total of 77 bears killed, 91 people injured, 107 citations given, and 1 tort claim paid.18 No clear trends emerged, other than spikes in the level of activity whenever something happened to diminish the bears’ natural food supply. Significantly, there had never been a single, recorded, bear-related human fatality in the park. Nevertheless, when two young women were killed by grizzly bears in two separate incidents coincidentally on the same night in Glacier National Park in 1967, the sensational event suddenly fo-
cused public attention on human-bear conflicts in all the national parks. It caused parks with a so-called bear problem to re-examine how they dealt with bears, giving increased emphasis to public safety. At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Chief Ranger G. Lee Sneddon and a task force of five other rangers developed a bear management program that was more systematic and aggressive than what the park had done in prior years. Although its stated objective was “to maintain bear populations in their natural environments,” its underlying motive was to reduce the Park Service’s exposure to tort claims resulting from bear-caused injuries, property damage, or the unlikely event of a fatal bear attack. As Superintendent Fry wrote in defense of the program, “Preservation of human life takes precedence over all other responsibilities in Park operations.” The principal features of the program were installation of bear proof garbage cans, scheduling of garbage pickups as often as possible, implementation of a more intensive education and law enforcement program, and capture and removal of bears from developed areas on each bear’s first appearance. Each time a bear was captured, it would be ear-tagged and released in a remote area far from the site of capture. If the bear returned to the site, it would be recaptured and turned over to the State of North Carolina or Tennessee. If a bear that had been turned over to one of the states was recaptured in the park, then the park would “determine the disposition of the animal,” meaning that it might be killed.19 The program also called for research on the ecology, habitat, and behavior of the black bear, with emphasis on human-bear interactions. A biology professor at the University of Tennessee, Michael R. Pelton, was the first to respond to this call for research and in 1969 he began a long association with the park. Pelton worked in the park himself and also supervised a three-year project by graduate student Jane Tate Eagar.20 Midway through Pelton’s studies, the Park Service initiated its own research on human-bear interactions by two biologists stationed at the newly established Uplands Field Research Laboratory, Francis J. Singer and Susan Power Bratton. These studies led to increased knowledge of the black bear in the Great Smoky Mountains and in particular, better understanding of bear behavior when bears became habituated to human food sources. As a result of the studies, the park made significant adjustments to the bear management program in 1976.21 Pelton’s and Eagar’s work pointed to complex relationships between bear population and reproduction, fluctuations in the availability of mast, and fluctuations in the incidence of panhandling. Aversive conditioning of nuisance bears provided only a partial answer, the researchers urged. It had to be coupled with less feeding by visitors and less
Wildlife biologist Kim DeLozier called Chimneys Picnic Area “the worst spot in the eastern U.S. for habituating wild bears to people.” The park clamped down on bear feeding at the site and intensified garbage collection.
availability of garbage in order to make panhandling less attractive. Singer’s and Bratton’s work corroborated Pelton’s and Eagar’s by showing how ubiquitous human food sources had become in the bears’ diet, even in the backcountry. Like Pelton and Eagar, the two Park Service biologists recommended a reorientation of the bear management program toward visitor education. In addition, Singer and Bratton called for putting greater emphasis on “the burgeoning backcountry bear-human relations problem.”22 Starting in 1976, biologists began providing guidance for bear management in the park, but the ranger force was still in charge. The park soon made enormous headway in bearproofing garbage receptacles in developed areas. It experimented with techniques for bear-proofing backcountry campsites by providing three-pole devices for hanging food out of bears’ reach. It strove to educate visitors by offering more verbal instruction, disseminating more written materials, and issuing more citations for failure to keep food secured.23 Changing human behavior took time, but park officials believed that the combination of bear-proofing and visitor education made a marked difference in 1992, the first year in 149
a long time when the mast crop failed and bears were unusually intent on seeking human food sources. Compared to the pattern of bear-human interactions in the 1960s, the park came through this year with a remarkable record: 92 bear incidents and 54 bear captures but only 2 minor bear-related human injuries and a small amount of property damage.24 In the 1990s, the efforts toward bear-proofing and visitor education continued, with a focus on certain problem areas such as the heavily traveled corridor from Gatlinburg to Chimneys Picnic Area. At the beginning of the 1990s it was still a common thing for a family to buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Gatlinburg and drive up to Chimneys to feed the panhandler bears. Because of that picnic area’s extraordinarily heavy use, park biologist Kim DeLozier called it “the worst spot in the eastern U.S. for habituating wild bears to people.” The park clamped down on bear feeding at the picnic area and intensified garbage collection. In one year, the number of nuisance bears trapped at Chimneys Picnic Area fell dramatically.25 At the beginning of the new century the park had a large, healthy black bear population, with an estimated two bears per square mile, the greatest density over a wide area found anywhere in the world. But the population remained vulnerable. When bears became habituated to human food sources they lived only half as long as bears that did not, partly because they could be harmed by ingesting plastic wrap, broken glass, toxic substances, and other dangerous items, and partly because these food sources brought them into a more lethal environment where they could be hit by cars, accidentally killed in the process of being trapped and removed, intentionally destroyed because they were dangerous, or shot by poachers. Poaching, in fact, removed an estimated 45 to 80 bears from the population in and around the park each year.26 Modern bear poachers are mostly trafficking in an international black market. Various parts of the American black bear — claws, feet, teeth, heads, skins, and gallbladders — are highly prized in Asia for their supposed medicinal qualities. Dried bear gallbladder, which is used in potions as an aphrodisiac, sells in the black market for $35 to $75 an ounce. Because it is heavily poached, the American back bear was listed under the Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which prohibits the sale or export of listed species. In the 1980s, a large poachers’ ring operated in the North Carolina side of the park, taking perhaps 500 bears over a span of several years. In a sting operation that finally came to a head in 1988, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service infiltrated the ring with an undercover agent and obtained photographs of the poachers posing with their dead quarry. The sting operation was so secret that the su150
perintendent was the only member of the park staff informed about it. When the huge takedown finally occurred, officers of the law netted 66 suspects in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, all of whom were later convicted.27
E U RO P E A N W I L D B O A R The nonnative wild boar entered the park around 1950 and soon established itself as a permanent resident and serious disturber of the native flora and fauna. Using its tusks like a plough, the animal digs its snout into the ground in search of tubers, uprooting plants and accelerating soil erosion. It devours the mast that is such an important part of the black bear’s food supply. It preys on vulnerable populations of snails and salamanders, whose evolutionary defenses do not take account of this predator. Its prolific disturbance of leaf litter on the forest floor wreaks havoc on the habitat of these critters as well as many other small animals. Its fondness for wallowing further impacts the environment, as the wallows tend to muddy streams and clog springs. Able to reproduce at a prodigious rate, unfettered by natural predators, and instinctively wily toward humans, the wild boar has proven to be a very difficult nonnative species to control.28 A group of North Carolina sportsmen introduced European wild boar into the United States in 1912 when they imported some animals to stock a private hunting preserve on Hooper’s Bald, only a dozen miles from what became Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In the early 1920s, the animals escaped and spread into the surrounding mountains. Although interbreeding with feral swine occurred as the population dispersed, a chromosomal analysis of European wild boars found on the Tellico Wildlife Management Area some 40 years later showed that the animal remained genetically close to the European stock. The State of North Carolina classified the wild boar as a big-game species, and in 1959 the Tennessee Game and Fish Commission began studying it to understand its ecology and how it might be controlled.29 Rangers began to monitor the effects of wild boars in the 1950s, when the animal was still confined to the western part of the park. In 1958, they recorded extensive rooting damage on Parsons Bald and Gregory Bald. In August 1959, rangers trapped two hogs along Parson Branch Road, and the following year they trapped twenty more, of which fourteen were turned over to the State of Tennessee Game and Fish Commission for stocking game management areas. In the fall of 1960, rangers began shooting and trapping hogs on the North Carolina side of the park primarily along the north shore of Fontana Lake. Starting in 1962, some of the animals captured on the North Carolina side were conveyed to the
North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission for stocking elsewhere. The Park Service had cooperative agreements with both states in which the park’s interest in eliminating hogs in the park and the states’ interest in managing hogs as game were mutually acknowledged. Chief Ranger C. E. Johnson indicated in a memorandum in August 1959 that the goal of the trapping program was to eliminate this nonnative species from the park entirely.30 Despite the wild boar’s high productive rate (females sometimes bear litters of five piglets twice in a year) the animal spread into new territory relatively slowly. Through the first half of the 1960s, control efforts in the park were mainly confined to the north shore of Fontana Lake and around Cades Cove. In November 1967, a hog was shot on the Middle Prong of Little River, marking the beginning of the animal’s advance into the eastern part of the park. By 1969, a concerned ranger in the Little River subdistrict estimated there might be 100 hogs in the area with the potential to produce an “explosive increase of population.” That year, a total of 155 wild boars were removed from the park, the most in any year since the program began in 1959, yet rangers sensed the hog problem was getting away from them. “The trouble is,” one said, “we just manage to trap enough of them to increase the food supply for the rest. Then the free sows have larger litters, and we’re right back where we started.”31 They called for research into boar ecology that might shed light on more effective control methods. Superintendent Fry requested a study “to develop an effective wild hog elimination program.”32 In the early 1970s, researchers at the University of Tennessee took the lead in studying the wild boar in the park, with the Park Service and the Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association providing logistical support and funding, respectively.33 As research proceeded on the animal’s food habits and reproduction, rangers noted its continued expansion eastward. By 1972, numerous hogs were inhabiting the area around Sugarlands; in 1973, a sow was trapped in Cherokee Orchard; in 1974, several hogs were trapped on Twin Creeks and Roaring Fork.34 At this time, Susan Powers Bratton was a Cornell University graduate student in plant ecology and a part-time resident in the park as she prepared her Ph.D. dissertation on high-elevation plant communities. Observing the changes caused by rooting in beech forest communities, Bratton addressed the wild boar problem in her dissertation and shared her work, which included an exhaustive review of scientific literature on the wild boar, with the Park Service. In response, the chief scientist in the Southeast Region offered Bratton a position in the park, asking her to establish the Uplands Field Research Laboratory. Initially the laboratory was
Controlling non-native wild hogs has proven to be a daunting task for the Smokies and most other land management agencies in the South. Said one park staff member, “The trouble is, we just manage to trap enough of them to increase the food for the rest. Then the free sows have larger litters, and we’re right back where we started.”
part of the regional office although it was located in the park. Bratton’s appointment coincided with that of Superintendent Evison, who gave the new science program his enthusiastic support. The following year, Francis J. Singer was hired as the first resident wildlife biologist in the park since the CCC era. Singer became the lead scientist in subsequent wild boar studies.35 Research on the wild boar was a top priority of the new science staff, and both Bratton and Singer placed new demands on the rangers’ control efforts. In August 1975, Bratton initiated more detailed record keeping of each hog taken in the park. Starting in January 1976, all hogs killed were dissected, the parts of the animals most commonly brought to the lab being the animals’ stomachs (for analyzing food habits), uteruses (for researching reproduction), and eyeballs or lower jaws (for aging the specimen). Beginning in 1977, a few rangers were devoted exclusively to the control program. The science staff, for its part, embarked on studies of the wild boar’s food habits, its effects on native vegetation, trapping methods, censusing, radiotelemetry, and mast survey. Evison pressed the science group for data and recommendations, and in March 1978 the park put out an interim wild boar management plan.36 In the midst of this flurry of research on wild boar management, the park conducted an ill-advised experiment in 151
the use of dogs to assist control efforts. The park contracted with a professionally qualified dog handler, C. R. Todd of Jesup, Georgia, and in August 1977, rangers began a 14-day trial use of Todd’s dogs to capture 100 boars within the park. When only one boar was successfully captured after four days of effort, the project was aborted. This failed experiment raised a furor among sportsmen in North Carolina, who had been pressing the Park Service for years to allow public hunting as a control measure. The Park Service’s attempted use of dogs rather than sport hunters infuriated them. Evison tried to calm the situation by placing a brief moratorium on all killing of wild boars in the park. The moratorium lasted approximately six months until the interim plan came out.37 The interim plan stated that while the Park Service lacked the ability to eradicate the wild boar from the park completely — using present methods of control — it did have the ability to reduce the number of wild boars throughout the park and it was essential to make that effort. Further, the Park Service had the ability to eliminate or nearly eliminate wild boars’ impacts on certain species and ecosystems. Thus, the control effort was directed at two goals: reducing the overall population by the most efficient means possible, and eliminating or nearly eliminating the presence of wild boars in critical areas. The plan stated that existing control methods would continue, with the wild boar population being reduced by a combination of trapping and “direct reduction” or shooting of wild boars by qualified Park Service personnel. Research would continue on alternative methods.38 The final plan, approved in June 1982, essentially followed along the same lines as the interim plan but it offered details on numerous alternative control methods that the park had taken under advisement. One option was to reintroduce predators. Two species of large predator were once native and could be reintroduced: the eastern timber wolf and the eastern mountain lion. However, even if reintroductions were successful, which appeared doubtful, both the wolf and the mountain lion would likely prey more heavily on whitetailed deer than on European wild boar. Another option was to kill boars with toxicants. This option was potentially costeffective and efficient, but no known toxicants were target specific for the European wild boar. Clay pigeons, Rotenone, and zinc phosphide were each potentially effective, but each carried risks for non-target species. A third option, public hunting, was rejected because the law governing the administration of national parks specifically prohibited it. A fourth option was to introduce a disease pathogen, such as hog cholera, that was host-specific for the wild boar. The problem with this option was that it carried the risk of transfer to domestic pigs outside the park. Finally, there was the poten152
tial use of reproductive inhibitors or sterilizing agents. Known compounds were either too potent and dangerous for humans to handle, or they required an extended period of treatment of each individual animal to sterilize it, an impractical solution for such an elusive wild animal. A recitation of these options led back to the idea that conventional control methods – trapping and direct reduction – had to be continued. Given the exorbitant manpower demands of conventional control methods, however, the Park Service made a plea for volunteer and state aid.39 State aid in trapping hogs was not forthcoming, although state officials continued to cooperate with park rangers in receiving trapped hogs for relocation to wildlife management areas in North Carolina and Tennessee. An updating of the wild boar management plan in 1993 resulted in no fundamental change to the program. It did continue to undergo refinements. In 1999, a record 356 hogs were removed from the park. The superintendent’s annual report for that year noted that a group was petitioning to stop the Park Service from killing wild hogs; “however, local opposition to wild hog control is much less than in the 1970s and 1980s and may die out due to insufficient interest.”40
W H I T E -T A I L E D D E E R
OF
CADES COVE
By maintaining open fields in Cades Cove, park managers recognized that they were creating attractive deer habitat and a potential problem of deer overabundance. Through the 1950s and 1960s, park managers kept an eye on the deer population as it slowly recovered. A wildlife and habitat management plan in 1967 noted that the deer population in Cades Cove, though concentrated, appeared to be fairly static, a condition that was probably attributable to movement of deer outside the park into areas where they were hunted. If the deer herd should get too large and start to impact the vegetation, this plan stated, the park would initiate control methods, including live-trapping and transplanting deer to other areas and, if necessary, direct reduction by rangers.41 New management guidelines in 1968 emphasized “natural regulation” as a preferred alternative to direct reduction. “Regulation of native animal populations in natural zones shall be permitted to occur by natural means to the greatest extent possible,” the guidelines stated. This policy presented the park with a dilemma. Cades Cove was the largest of five areas in the park designated as historical zones. As most of the park was managed as a natural zone, Cades Cove formed an enclave within this larger natural area. The open fields in Cades Cove supported an unnaturally dense population of deer that moved back and forth between the historical and natural zones. Was this protected and highly visible deer
herd to be managed by natural regulation? Since the open fields supported an unnatural density of deer, and there were no natural predators to keep numbers in check, what would natural regulation look like here? Beginning in 1970, researchers began loosely monitoring the Cades Cove deer population. In 1971, the herd experienced a major die-off due to hemorrhagic disease, but the population rebounded after just one year. The deer density in Cades Cove continued to increase through the rest of the decade. In 1980, it was considered one of the most concentrated deer populations found anywhere in the South. In 1981, the park received a request from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency for 50 deer to be used for restocking in Hawkins County. The park agreed to the translocation, and state biologists captured and removed a total of 51 deer. Shortly before the removal operation, a series of deer counts by transect estimated the size of the herd between 293 and 531 head. A post removal count placed the herd at 537 head. After these translocations, no more efforts were made to control herd size. Spotlight counts in 1983-84 indicated that the herd had finally stabilized at a relatively high density.42 By 1989, Park Service biologists felt cautiously optimistic that natural regulation was working. “The deer herd of Cades Cove…represents a unique opportunity to observe and monitor an unhunted population in a relatively natural environment,” a resources management report stated. 43 It seemed that in this southern setting, where winters were too mild to cull the herd, disease was the natural control that held the population in check. Accordingly, research in the 1980s and early 1990s focused on monitoring the presence of infectious diseases in the herd. In 1997, the park stepped up habitat monitoring as well. Researchers established 30 vegetation plots, each 10 meters square, half set up as deer exclosures and half left unfenced as control plots. Eight years into the study, researchers found no difference in the number of species present in the exclosures and the control plots (although, not surprisingly, they did find that tree seedlings were quick to get established in the exclosures).44 At the start of the twenty-first century, some managers still had qualms about how natural regulation of the deer herd interfaced with artificial manipulation of habitat in this historical zone. But for the time being, at least, natural and historical values were joined in Cades Cove in a kind of peaceful coexistence.
R E I N T RO D U C T I O N S In 1967, Superintendent Fry asserted, “All wildlife species that were present when the Park was established still exist within the present Park boundary.”45 Well and good, no species had been lost on the Park Service’s watch. But the
Leopold Report of 1963 challenged park managers to think and act more boldly: why not reintroduce extirpated species? Over the next 30 years, the park attempted four reintroductions: peregrine falcon, river otter, red wolf, and North American elk. The red wolf was unable to reproduce successfully in the park, but the other reintroductions took hold, restoring three species to the park’s biota. Contrary to Fry’s claim, the last known nesting pair of peregrine falcons at Great Smoky Mountains National Park was reported near Alum Cave Bluff in 1942, so this species did in fact disappear after the park was established. The decline of the peregrine falcon was attributed to the buildup of DDT in the environment. As a top predator in the food chain, the falcon accumulated DDT in its body, which caused a thinning of its eggshell and consequently a high rate of reproductive failure. By the mid-1960s there were no known pairs remaining east of the Mississippi River. However, a captive breeding program initiated by Cornell University scientists in 1970 led to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recovery program five years later aimed at reestablishing the peregrine falcon in its eastern breeding range. By 1975, DDT residues in the environment were at low enough levels to pose no threat to the bird. In 1984, the FWS selected Great Smoky Mountains National Park as the most promising site for a reintroduction of the falcon in Tennessee. Assistant Superintendent Roland H. Wauer and Superintendent Cook agreed that there were compelling biological, aesthetic, and moral reasons to support the effort. The Park Service cooperated with the FWS, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, TVA, and the Peregrine Fund in carrying out the project.46 A total of thirteen young peregrine falcons were hacked and released. For the next ten years peregrine falcons were sighted in the park but no nesting pair was recorded. Starting in 1997, a pair nested in the Alum Cave Bluff area.47 The next animal reintroduced in the park was the river otter. A mostly fish-eating carnivore, the river otter is three to four feet long and weighs about 22 pounds. Its body is finely adapted for an aquatic environment, with webbed feet, a muscular tail, a sleek head and torso, and a thick, two-layered coat of oiled under-fur and long guard hairs. The otter’s fine pelt made it a valued commodity in the fur trade and the animal was relentlessly hunted by fur trappers in the nineteenth century. Once abundant throughout North America, it was drastically reduced in numbers. In the twentieth century, pollution and the destruction of wetlands eliminated the animal from much of its original range. The last recorded sighting of a river otter in the Smokies was in 1936.48 The otter was reintroduced in Tennessee in 1982 at Land Between the Lakes in a cooperative effort by TVA and the 153
The effort to reintroduce red wolves to the park ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA). Encouraged by the results, TVA and TWRA broached the Park Service about reintroducing the otter at Great Smoky Mountains. Park Service officials were receptive as the reintroduction met all of the Park Service’s criteria. As park biologist Kim DeLozier explained, besides the obvious requirement that the reintroduced species is native, “the species can’t be detrimental to other native species in the park, and it can’t be detrimental to nearby landowners.” There was some resistance to the reintroduction by anglers who feared the otter would prey heavily on trout, but biologists thought the otter would most likely go after slow-moving, bottom-feeding fish that were easier to catch, and this did prove to be the case. Jane Griess, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee who wrote her master’s thesis on the reintroduction of otter at Great Smoky Mountains, contended that “otters may actually benefit trout populations by removing competitive fish from trout waters.”49 After nearly two years of discussion and feasibility studies, 14 otter were captured and shipped to the University of Tennessee. Two died of stress en route and a third was too severely injured to be released into the wild, but the remaining 11 recovered from the trauma of their capture and shipment. These otters were quarantined at the University of Tennessee for a minimum of ten days, and while in quaran154
tine each one was fitted with a radio transmitter (surgically implanted in a cavity in the intestinal area where the device would not interfere with the animal’s mobility or reproductive capabilities). On February 28, 1986, they were released into Abrams Creek. Some people involved in the effort had worried that these otters, which had been captured in warm, lowland rivers on North Carolina’s coastal plain, would migrate out of the park in search of warmer waters with more food in them. But they stayed in the area and bred and successfully raised young.50 The park followed up this effort with more releases in other parts of the park. The next test was to see if otter could thrive in waters that were more heavily visited by humans. Accordingly ten otters captured in South Carolina were released in the Little River during the winter of 1988-89, and four more from Louisiana were released in the same area in 1990. Another ten were released in 1992, eight of these on the North Carolina side of the park.51 The attempt to reintroduce the red wolf began with an inquiry to Superintendent Pope from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in about 1990. Approximately ten years earlier, the FWS had captured some of the last remaining red wolves in the wild on the coastal plains of North Carolina and South Carolina and had transported them to Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, where a captive breeding program was established. By about 1990, this captive population had grown from 14 to more than 100 individuals, and the FWS wanted to take some and attempt to re-establish them in their native habitat. Great Smoky Mountains National Park appeared to be a good prospect. Pope strongly supported it and invested a good deal of time on the matter over the next few years. First he held discussions with his staff and once his staff was on board he widened the circle to include state and local representatives. A major concern was whether this large predator posed a threat to humans. Wolf biologists brought out the important point that the red wolf does not run in packs like the northern timber wolf. Another concern was that the red wolf would attack livestock. The FWS made arrangements to compensate livestock owners for any loss of cattle in Cades Cove, where one of the releases was planned.52 Over the winter of 1991-92, a red wolf family was experimentally released and recaptured. In October 1992, a red wolf family was released from a pen near Cades Cove, and in December 1992, a second family was released from a pen near Tremont. Cades Cove was selected because it had an abundance of deer as well as a small herd of cattle. Biologists wanted to learn whether the wolves would prey on livestock. Prior to the release, biologists worked with livestock owners to construct a “nursery corral” for the protection of young
The experimental elk reintroduction started in 2001 in Cataloochee Valley with the release of 25 animals from Land Between the Lakes. Today, the park’s elk population continues to grow and disperse.
calves. Five calves were lost to wolf predation, all of which were taken when they were outside this corral.53 Both wolf families produced litters in the spring of 1993. All of the wolf pups died during the next six months. Biologists suspected they were killed by parvo virus, a disease to which the wolves had low resistance because it had only appeared in the Southeast in the early 1980s (when the population was in exile at Point Defiance Zoo). The pattern was repeated annually: in the spring new litters appeared, and by fall all of the pups had been found dead or had vanished. After five years of watching the adult wolves fail to sustain young, biologists with the FWS determined that they must abandon the wolf recovery effort at Great Smoky Mountains and refocus the effort in other areas where climate and land conditions might be more suitable.54 The last adult red wolf was captured and removed in 1998. While the red wolf recovery effort ended on a down note for the park, another reintroduction was getting underway that would give people much joy. In 2000, the park completed an environmental assessment for the reintroduction
of North American elk, a species that had been missing from the native biota for about two centuries. Major concerns about this reintroduction included the effects that this very large herbivore might have on the ecosystem, and its potential to carry diseases that could be passed to cattle outside the park. Also, while elk had been successfully reintroduced in a number of locations in the eastern United States, the project carried the usual risk of failure. One notable risk factor: the park was a good deal more forested than was ideal for elk habitat.55 The elk were released in the Cataloochee Valley in 2001, each one radio-collared and ear-tagged so that the Park Service could track its movements. After five years, the elk herd was growing and its range was spreading to other parts of the park and outside the park. December 2005 marked the end of the first phase (experimental release and data collection) and the beginning of the second phase (data evaluation). Indications were strong that the elk reintroduction was a success.
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